Tischa A. Munoz-Erickson, Ph.D. - US grants

Abstract SES-1444755


Urban areas are vulnerable to extreme weather related events given their location, high concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructure. Impacts of Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and other disasters demonstrate not just failures in built infrastructure, they highlight the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and information systems to prepare for and respond to events of this magnitude. The highly interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) team will develop a diverse suite of new methods and tools to assess how infrastructure can be more resilient, provide ecosystem services, improve social well being, and exploit new technologies in ways that benefit all segments of urban populations. Starting with nine network cities (six continental U.S. and three Latin American, home to over 35 million residents) and expanding in future years, the vision of the UREx SRN is to co-produce the knowledge needed to promote resilient, livable cities in a future that will look very different from today. The extreme events that this project will focus on include urban flooding, coastal storms, regional droughts, and extreme heat waves. These events are already occurring with shocking frequency in U.S. and global cities. Infrastructure is viewed as an important line of defense against hazards and disasters, yet current urban infrastructure is aging and proving inadequate for protecting city populations. The UREx team will link SRN scientists, students, local practitioners, planners, industry, NGOs, and other stakeholders across >25 institutions and >70 collaborators to co-produce data, models, images, stories, and on-the-ground projects that show how a new resilient infrastructure can be developed. Infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, safe-to-fail, socially equitable, and ecologically based will enhance urban resilience in the face of a higher incidence of extreme events, more culturally diverse communities, and continued urbanization pressures. Ultimately, the UREx SRN will help accelerate knowledge generation and application to encourage innovative strategies towards urban sustainability.


The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) will develop a novel theoretical framework for integrating social, ecological, and technological system (SETS) dimensions for conceptualizing, analyzing, and supporting urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty in a more holistic way. The primary research question is: how do SETS domains interact to generate vulnerability or resilience to extreme weather related events, and how can urban SETS dynamics be guided along more resilient, equitable, and sustainable trajectories? The foundation of the network is eight working groups (WG) who will work together to answer this question. Network activities include: assembling comparable datasets for the cities; doing advanced climate and hydrological modeling and downscaling; conducting comparative analyses; further developing the SETS conceptual framework; experimenting with new visualization and computation approaches for representing the data and the SETS framework; using these products in participatory modeling and scenario analysis for each city; and developing the science and practice for transitioning infrastructure to meet 21st century resilience and sustainability goals. Continual network and educational evaluation will allow realignment and adjustment of the work based on iterative assessments. The program will develop a suite of interactive educational activities spanning institutions across the network, and including local practitioners as well as university students and young professionals. Working Groups include integral educational, communications, and diversity-enhancing activities for graduate and post-doctoral fellows, early-career researchers, and city professionals aimed at developing a model for co-producing effective and robust decision-support tools and educating the next generation of scientists and practitioners to carry out this work. These programs are expected to be especially attractive to Hispanic students and practitioners due to the project's focus on understanding the increasing cultural and intellectual connections of the U.S. and Latin America.

The strategic goals of the UREx SRN are to:
1)Build a network of cities, institutions, and student, post-doctoral, and faculty researchers to explore resilience of cities to extreme weather related events;
2)Develop novel theoretical frameworks that express a vision of sustainable, integrated urban infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, safe-to-fail, socially equitable, and ecologically based;
3)Work with practitioners and decision makers, as well as a cadre of graduate and post-doctoral fellows, to co-produce knowledge that facilitates data-driven visioning and ultimately transitions to a sustainable future for urban infrastructure and, by extension, the fabric of urban social-ecological-technological sustainability; and
4)Create a model for incorporating assessment, learning, and adjustment in response to evaluative feedback in a large, transdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research network.

Non-technical abstract: People living in cities in all regions of the world are experiencing increases in extreme events like floods and heat waves. Urban decision makers need help to develop ways to meet this challenge that are based in scientific understanding. This International Research Experience for Students (IRES) grant is linked to the Urban Resilience to Extremes (UREx) Sustainability Research Network (SRN). The grant will support three graduate students and one undergraduate student each year for ten weeks work in Valdivia, Chile (2017); Hermosillo, Mexico (2018); and in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (2019). A total of nine UREx IRES graduate students will be trained over three years, broadening their skills in collaboration, transdisciplinary research methods, and in mentoring. They will gain appreciation for the unique challenges of Latin American cities, while benefiting from the opportunity to participate in research that is directly used by decision makers, and receive training and experience in workshop facilitation with local decision-makers and communities. Three UREx IRES undergraduate students will also gain research experience in a foreign country, learn about the process of science through not only conducting their own research project but working closely with graduate students conducting research, and gain skills in research design, data analysis and management, and presentation. This experience will help all of these students learn to work across diverse social and political cultures so that they might be more effective. The students who participate in this program will share their experiences with others in the UREx program through a reading group, blogs, and social media and at a capstone symposium to be organized in 2020 by UREx fellows.


Technical description: Cities are highly vulnerable to extreme, weather-related events, given their location along coastlines and in drylands. As urbanization continues as the main demographic trend worldwide, an ever-greater proportion of the population is exposed to hazard. Little research has been done on Latin American cities, where strategies to enhance their resilience in the face of such events may differ from US cities owing to cultural, political, or biophysical differences. The UREx SRN is a multi-city network of scientists and local practitioners, including Latin American cities, which studies, envisions, and develops innovative solutions to the challenges of these extreme events. Linked to the UREx SRN, the UREx IRES program will train students in working across cultures and disciplines and with local decision-makers. Mentors at the host institutions are collaborators in the UREx SRN and are conducting urban resilience research in these cities. The UREx IRES will afford opportunities for nine UREx fellows to expand their dissertation research into these Latin American cities, enabling projects that can be used to compare resilient solutions between US and Latin American cities. Three UREx IRES undergraduates will be selected to work on research projects in close collaboration with the graduate students, supervised by host mentors. The students' creativity is emphasized: as part of the UREx SRN they will have had experience with interdisciplinary research, training on Latin American cities, and will write a short research proposal that explains how their IRES project will integrate with their dissertation research and contribute to the overall knowledge-to-action efforts in the host city. UREx IRES fellows will be conducting transdisciplinary research with practitioners and host mentors that will advance basic scientific understanding of the characteristics of urban areas in general and infrastructure in particular that will lead to more resilient, and ultimately sustainable, cities in the future.

Coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to increased risk from sea-level rise and coastal, riverine, and urban flooding. An aging urban infrastructure is proving inadequate for protecting communities from the impacts of these events. Disasters make evident that failures take place not just in the built infrastructure, but also in the information infrastructure that engineers and decision-makers use to prepare and respond. Limitations in information and data systems constrain the ability of cities to learn, adapt, and reduce the vulnerability of their populations to various extreme events. Civic leaders, data scientists, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations increasingly are interested in using "smart city" technologies to optimize city operations; however, their effectiveness depends on multiple technological, cognitive, social, and institutional factors. This SCC Planning Grant will be used to design a research program that advances understanding of the socio-political, ecological, and technological conditions for S&CC that promote coastal resilience and transformation. The team will nurture new, integrative, and interdisciplinary research collaborations, develop research capacity-building activities, and undertake meaningful community engagement in the coastal communities of Miami, San Juan, and Baltimore. Collectively, these coastal communities cover a population of more than a million people that will benefit from this project. Specific objectives are to: 1) develop a diverse research community to advance fundamental understanding of smart and connected communities; 2) engage multiple practitioners and stakeholders to contribute to planning and establishing direction of the research program; and 3) develop and foster research-practitioner interactions and research capacity through Innovation Webinars, Dialogues, and Labs.

The overall strategy of this SCC Planning Grant consists of bringing together small groups of researchers, subject matter experts, and community stakeholders in a variety of innovative and collaborative activities in each of three coastal cities: Miami, San Juan, and Baltimore. A transdisciplinary team will be assembled that encompasses social science, natural science, and engineering fields, including risk communication, science and technology studies, data and computation science, and communication. Data resources and outputs from the three coastal cities will be used to advance fundamental understanding of smart and connected communities from a social-ecological-technological systems approach. Innovative tools for virtual communication, data sharing, idea nurturing, and product generation will facilitate interaction and underpin communication. Strategies for maximizing participation of students and early-career scientists in each city will be employed to enhance their research capacities on social and technical aspects of the cities' information and technology needs. Researchers and communities will co-develop a vision for an integrated research program for a smart city framework of the future that includes: 1) advances in theories of knowledge co-production by examining social practices that institutions use to produce, share, and use information for envisioning and implementing strategies in their communities; 2) novel methodologies for collecting, managing, analyzing, and visualizing more diverse data to assist communities in exploring their resilience and envisioning sustainable futures from an integrative perspective; 3) understanding of the social, political, ecological, and ethical implications of smart and connected technologies; and, 4) new approaches in the modeling and design of complex infrastructures that take into account the dynamic nature of climate systems and cities.

The objective of this Growing Convergence Research project is to explore how social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) interact to generate vulnerability or resilience to extreme weather events and how urban SETS dynamics might be guided along more resilient and sustainable trajectories. This project is motivated by the challenge of minimizing the impacts of extreme events, such as hurricanes and the accompanying storm surges, extreme heat, and flash flooding brought on by heavy rain events, on cities. The research team will develop convergence a) by bridging across the social, ecological, and technological domains; b) integrating socio-ecological-systems (SES), socio-technological systems (STS), and engineering theories of resilience into a common definition of resilience in which adaptive capacity is central; and c) working together with practitioners and community members to collaboratively envision resilient urban futures and articulating needs for implementing system-oriented solutions.

Utilizing Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, and San Juan as study cities, this project will: a) apply and integrate simulations of power, water, transportation, and building systems to assess vulnerabilities to extreme events for future infrastructure scenarios in each city; b) model projections of heat and flood exposure combined with land use/land cover (LULC) change scenarios to assess future extreme event risk for future infrastructure scenarios in each city; c) analyze governance networks that address resiliency and associated actor agency, including visions, mental models of system vulnerabilities, institutional structures, and decision-making processes that are essential to navigate transformational changes in future scenarios; d) employ participatory visioning to co-develop future scenarios of resilient SETS infrastructures and explore with practitioners responses to future extreme event scenarios and social-ecological-technological changes; e) develop a researcher-practitioner transdisciplinary process to explore how resilience solutions might be implemented in diverse urban systems; and f) synthesize outcomes of future simulations and scenarios in an online interactive researcher-practitioner visualization platform as a potential decision-support tool.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.